Thursday, April 7, 2011

Finding Family

Even tho I'm not actually doing the A-Z challenge I thought I'd publish some of the posts I'd prepared so todays is about a favourite subject of mine - Finding Family -

My father told me once he didn't mind where I went or what I did as long as I remembered where I came from.

That seemed to be his take on an old saying:-

There are two things you should give your children - roots and wings.

For a few years now I've tried to gather facts and figures about my side of the family to pass down to my children and their families but it sort of went on the backburner for a while.

Anyway I started looking at things again in earnest after our last visit to Dh's 'Canadian' aunt (Sept. 2010) - now we've visited many times over the past 20 years but this time she seemed to want to talk more and more about the family she left behind in England. She had gone to Nova Scotia as a war bridge in 1945 and apart from one occasion has never returned.

Back home in October, after telling her I'd try to find her roots and document them and armed with loads of facts gleaned from chats over the years plus various bits and pieces told to me by my mil (her sister), I started to piece her family together.

There were a few names and dates thrown in by Dh but as he'd left home as a young man to travel the world with the airforce he was a bit vague about the whole thing so it wasn't till I visited various family history sites in the Internet the information really came together.

Having worked my way through several generations of the family it has become obvious that one half of the tree really and truly had their roots deep in a very small area of an English county - the same went for the other half 'cept in another county about a hundred miles away. In the 1800's that was a fair distance and I'm blowed if I can find how the link was made between the two but I'll persevere - the reason could be in the next census I look at lol

Of course with the advent of the Internet it has become very easy to gather information such as this but please all of you take the time to write things down, names dates and places get forgotten especially as families drift apart and think its not important. You'd be surprised what can be gleaned from just a scap of paper or a photograph with a name on the the back tucked into an envelope and forgotten.